Along with carrying rock and pop music to unprecedented heights throughout the 1960s, The Beatles achieved the kind of commercial success that their contemporaries could only dream of. Even Elvis Presley before them hadn’t racked up anything like the number the Fab Four managed, particularly in the album stakes.
While Elvis had eight number one studio albums in both the US and the UK, of which four were actually soundtracks to his films, The Beatles accumulated 12 in half the time. Plus, an additional five US number-one LPs on which Capitol Records repackaged a mixture of singles and album tracks.
Every time The Beatles released an LP, it went right to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and usually stayed there for quite some time. They never bettered their feat of 51 consecutive weeks at the summit of the UK chart between 1963 and 1964, achieved with their first two efforts in the studio Please Please Me and With the Beatles. But, neither has anybody else since, and their 1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band gave it a good go. In the US, meanwhile, Pepper remained at number one for 15 straight weeks.
Well, every time, except once. In 1969, their perfect run of number one albums was finally broken, just as the band was turning into the home straight of their time together at the top.
So, what was the exception?
It seems a bit harsh to include this album in a list of Beatles studio albums and blemish their perfect chart-topping record. It is, after all, a soundtrack, and more than half of its tracks don’t even feature the band members.
Nevertheless, Yellow Submarine is categorised as one of their 13 studio releases by The Beatles’ own company. If they’re including it, so are we. It does have four original songs that you can’t find anywhere else in the group’s discography – two Lennon-McCartney compositions and another two by George Harrison.
It must be said that Harrison’s ‘Only a Northern Song’ is a dud, while ‘All Together Now’ is a children’s singalong that wouldn’t make sense on a Beatles album outside of this soundtrack to an animated film.
‘Hey Bulldog’ is the standout of the four, featuring a killer riff and some fun vocal interplay between Lennon and McCartney. ‘It’s All Too Much’ has plenty of interesting bits and pieces within it and sounds suitably trippy, given that it was left over from the band’s furthest forays into psychedelia back in ‘67.
But these tracks aren’t anywhere near enough to hold the record together, and neither are tacked-on rereleases of the title track and ‘All You Need Is Love’. Following its release in January 1969, the album peaked at number two in the US and number three in the UK.
Only two reconfigurations of the band’s early work in the United States, Introducing… The Beatles and Something New had previously failed to hit the top spot in either country. And they’re no longer part of the band’s official discography.
As charming as it may be in parts, Yellow Submarine isn’t up to the standard of a Beatles album. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr might consider it one, but sticklers for statistics might prefer they didn’t.
